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reConServer for easy SIP conferencing

Submitted by Daniel.Pocock on Tue, 08/04/2014 - 18:24

In the lead up to the release of Debian wheezy, there was quite some debate about the Mumble conferencing software which uses the deprecated and unsupported CELT codec. Although Mumble has very recently added Opus support, it is still limited by the fact that it is a standalone solution without any support for distributed protocols like SIP or XMPP.

Making SIP conferencing easy

Of course, people could always set up SIP conferences by installing Asterisk but for many use cases that may be overkill and may simply introduce alternative security and administration overheads.

The quick and easy way to try it

Normally, a SIP conferencing server will be linked to a SIP proxy and other infrastructure.

For trying it out quickly, however, no SIP proxy is necessary.

Simply install the package with the default settings and then configure a client to talk to the reConServer directly by dialing the IP address of the server.

For example, set the following options in /etc/reConServer/reConServer.config:

UDPPort = 5062
EnableAutoAnswer = true

and it will happily accept all SIP calls sent to the IP address where it is running.

Now configure Jitsi to talk to it directly in serverless SIP configuration:

Notice here that we simply put a username without any domain part, this tells Jitsi to create an account that can operate without a SIP proxy or registration server:

Calling in to the conference

Notice in the screenshot below we simply dial the IP address and port number of the reConServer process, sip:192.168.1.100:5062. When the first call comes in, reConServer will answer and place the caller on hold. When the next caller arrives, the hold should automatically finish and audio will be heard.

Next steps

To make it run as part of a proper SIP deployment, set the necessary configuration options (username, password, proxy) to make reConServer register to the SIP proxy. Users can then call the conference through the proxy.